I would love to see more of us owning and operating our "own" dedicated servers so that we can distrubute material freely on the web without asking permission.
The reality is -doing so might be very costly, especially when we are dealing with streaming media. You could host your own website in your basement if you wanted to, but there are many cons and very little pros to doing so, especially in this high tech cyber world: there are many server and hardware issues that have to be address at least once a week, or every day if you are dealing with attacks from hackers.
There are many people who believe the Government can shut down the internet anytime they want to- sometimes I am one of these people. Honestly, it’s really hard to tell. We do give the government too much power actually.
When it comes to computers, the techies are the ones with the power, not the government. True, the government might train and employ techies to do their dirty work- still, there are things happening on the net right now that are way beyond our government's control.
We are dealing with energy here, and lots of it. The only things a racist government can do are monitor and restrict that energy, but they cannot stop it. Why? Because the internet is made up of networking systems. There are far too many important systems, billion dollar companies lodged into these networks. Therefore, the Government cannot stop al qaeda from streaming videos of Americans getting beheaded, or the other info they communicate to one another.
Sure, there is all kinds of software built everyday by spy companies to try to track down Terrorists on the net…and even you. But guess what, remember I said the Techies are the ones with the power. America is not the ruler of the technological world, and its time Americans realize that because our Government will never admit that out loud. So who has the power? The very countries America out-sources to. There is far more Techie power in India and Japan, and so-called 3rd world nations have a greater advantage at training and learning technology than Americans too, they don’t have the burden of an American ego.
So if we are not going to own our own servers, the next option to use the hosting services in countries like China, India, Japan etc., most countries that don't care about your opinions about America or White Supremacy. I've had positive results with hosting companies in the UK too, some of them are ran and owned by people of color.
A Brotha down the street from me started a site you can upload videos too:
http://video.neoblack.com
I'm sure he doesn't own his server, but its a start. Hopefully he's not using the site to start his online Pimpin business like blackplanet.